Jason Peacey is a Professor of Early Modern British History at University College, London. He earned a Ph.D. from Cambridge University and before coming to University College, London, he was a research fellow at the History of Parliament Trust. Jason Peacey’s area of interest is British history in the early modern period. His research focuses on the politics and political culture of early modern Britain, and he is particularly interested in the relationships between print culture and political life, and between the citizen and the state. Jason is interested, therefore, in propaganda and censorship, and in the exploitation of the press by the political elite, as well as in the rise of news culture, and in the ways in which contemporaries from all walks of life and all parts of the country experienced the early modern ‘information revolution’ and participated in political affairs. He is currently writing a microhistory on politics and religion in a protracted seventeenth-century land dispute, provisionally entitled The Churchrobber and the Madman. At the same time he is also developing a new project relating to the political culture of print and diplomacy in seventeenth-century Europe, which will explore the possibilities for books and newspapers to traverse national borders, the constraints placed upon such flows of print, not least through diplomatic means, and the wider issues that arose in relation to sovereignty and international cooperation. In addition, Jason is one of the editors of a project funded by the Leverhulme Trust to produce a new edition of the letters and speeches of Oliver Cromwell.

Jason has also worked as a consultant on a range of TV documentaries, including episodes of Who Do You Think You Are? and a Channel 4 series entitled Blood on our Hands relating to the English Civil War (2005). He has also contributed to a number of history programmes on Radio 3 and Radio 4, including two editions of the Long View: on state surveillance (2015) and on House of Lords reform (2009).

The George Washington Forum on American Ideas, Politics, and Institutions at Ohio University is a participant in JMC’s Ohio Political Economy Initiative, made possible by a grant from the Thomas W. Smith Foundation. The Forum teaches America’s foundational principles in their Western intellectual, political, and institutional contexts. It is grounded on the idea that students facing an increasingly globalized world need to understand what characterizes and distinguishes the nation in which they live and the civilization from which it emerged. The Forum helps students become enlightened citizens in a liberal democracy whose roots run deep in Western civilization, but whose ideals and interests transcend the West.